Accomodation and the myth of presupposition: The view from discourse

Abstract

Presuppositions are argued to be epiphenomena of an inappropriate perspective. Just as a two-dimensional being would view three-dimensional phenomena as mysteriously appearing and disappearing objects in a largely static world, so too do sentence-grammarians view what is essentially the discourse-level phenomenon of information backgrounding as a mysterious kind of assumption having disturbing and largely unpredictable properties. In particular, they fail to see that accomodation, the introduction of new information non-assertively, is not merely a funny kind of presupposition, but is in fact functionally totally different. Here, accomodation is proposed to be among those processes which relativise the propositional content of the discourse to its deictic, epistemic and social setting. The paper includes a sketch of a model — Text World Theory — which allows the necessary distinctions to be made.